Quote

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Norman Mailer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Art
Intensify
Even
Final
People
Finals
Necessary
Consciousness
Moral
Purpose
Artist
Exacerbate

More quotes by Norman Mailer

Image
Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
Norman Mailer
Image
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
Norman Mailer
Image
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Norman Mailer
Image
The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
Norman Mailer
Image
As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
Norman Mailer
Image
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Norman Mailer
Image
We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer
Image
The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
Norman Mailer
Image
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.
Norman Mailer
Image
...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.
Norman Mailer
Image
We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
Norman Mailer
Image
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
Image
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
Norman Mailer
Image
I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
Norman Mailer
Image
MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
Norman Mailer
Image
I hate everything which is not in myself.
Norman Mailer
Image
Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.
Norman Mailer
Image
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Norman Mailer
Image
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Norman Mailer
Image
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
Norman Mailer